


It's Cold But You Pretend That You Are Warm With Me

by J_33



Category: Captain America - All Media Types, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Bukcy wasnt always bad, F/M, Natasha has lots of past, Steve is a boss, buckynat - Freeform, cap 2 spoilers, past shiz, romanogers - Freeform, why the heck not
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-04
Updated: 2014-05-04
Packaged: 2018-01-21 20:45:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,218
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1563467
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/J_33/pseuds/J_33
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes all she was, was a beautiful women with an ugly past.</p>
            </blockquote>





	It's Cold But You Pretend That You Are Warm With Me

**Author's Note:**

> So I started reading some of the Winter Soldier comics, and then I sorta became engulfed in Nat and Buckys past romance. I still ship romanogers 100%, and was actually gonna end this with a scene like that, but I've dcided to save that for my next fic, probably part of the "Nostalgia" series. So I hope you enjoy this new sort of style, and tell me which ship you think I write better, and if I should do any more buckynat ones:)

The air was cold, but it didn’t matter much; she was colder. There was snow on the ground, but it did nothing to help mask the trail of blood she was leaving behind. The bright whiteness of it all, only made the situation more ironic. Natalie Romanova knew that someone was looking for her, people always were. She was wanted in many countries, and she knew that, but she also knew how good she was, or how good she was made to be, and that only made this all the more worse. 

There was supposed to be a mission in Ukraine, and it was supposed to be fool proof. The Red Room didn’t do mistakes, and she had multiple scars to prove it, but somehow this hurt worse than any form of torture or beating her trainers could throw at her. The feeling of betrayal left a bad after taste, and one that she couldn’t get rid of so easily.

She was taught how to kill a man without leaving any evidence at the age of seven, she was trained on all the methods of getting information out of people whether she was the one being interrogated or not, but most importantly she learned how to survive in a world that took no prisoners. 

And now here she was in some abounded street barely holding it together. She could hear her bosses in her ear telling her how pathetic she was, how she was failing her country, how that should have let her burn in the fire that killed her parents so long ago. 

The man that she was sent to eliminate was a rich business man, but he had a dislike for dirty work, and the Red Room was dirty work, so of course they would want her to take him out. She could do it without a second look, without any regrets. But lately she could feel a space in her brain that felt like something was missing. She could sense a feeling of something more, but she couldn’t remember what. Everyday seemed to be a fresh start, but Natalie Romanov wasn’t fresh at all, she was dirty, dusty, and now she was doubtful too. 

Her first memory was of a ballet lesson, of little girls all around her dressed in pink tutus, and she was one of them as well. She remembered learning how to dance but she couldn’t seem to wrap her head around the music, almost like it was never there to begin with. Next she remembered being in a dark room tied to a chair. She was a little girl, but the tutu was gone; it was replaced with old, grimy clothes that were three sizes too big. She remembered bright lights, pointy needles, curious doctors, and a certain emptiness that filled the blank spots up in her head more than they should. She remembered them telling her that they wanted soldiers not mothers, as they injected her with some special serum. She remembered her mother’s voice, but not her face because it was too engulfed in burning flames to be distinct. She remembered the guards coming into her quarters late at night telling her that this was extra training, and she remembered not saying a word as they climbed into her bed because she believed it when they said it would make her better. She remembered countless training sessions. Learning how to speak language after language fluently, learning how to shoot guns, stab with knives, and choke with nothing but her bare hands. Then missions, and meetings, and briefings that made her feel a sickly sort of fulfillment, the more blood she had spilled, even when she had spilled none at all.

She remembered all those things and more, the worst of all was the things she couldn’t remember, the things that left her feeling empty and confused.

Natalie understood that though; she understood why this was the way things had to be. She understood that all this was for her country, for mother Russia to rise to the top once again. She wanted nothing more than to make her country proud, to serve them like they had served her, and to praise them like she owed them her life, but now it seemed like there was more. She didn’t ask questions, questions got people killed. Not knowing something was a weakness, because information was power. But now she was only just realizing that maybe she was powerless, and she always had been.

***

Sometimes in her dreams she remembered a myth of a man. It was always rumored that he was once an America soldier; that he lost his arm fighting for freedom, but now he was here to teach them better. His mission name was Winter Soldier. They never called him by a first name, it was always sir, but she always wanted to call him more. She didn’t see him much though. People said he was always off on missions killing hundreds of men all by himself, but when she did see him, she learned more than she ever thought possible. 

In a way he taught her everything that she knew, but there was one thing they taught each other, and that was how to love. She remembered the way his metal arm felt around her throat in training, cold and hard, but she also remembered the gentleness that it portrayed wrapped around her waist in bed, running through her red hair, and the silent touches that needed no words to display that he was there to protect her, to fight with her.

She saw the way his eyes held a glint of light, even when she saw him snap the necks of targets. She saw the way he promised to give the world to her, even when she saw him get wiped from it, and most importantly she saw the way he knew her, even when she saw him not know himself. They were both good, but together they were the best, and that was the very thing that damned them in the end. They were too close, and feelings were a liability, they both knew it, they just didn’t know it would be this hard. 

The day was as cold as could be, but she had never felt more like she was burning alive, unable to stop the flames from spreading. It was the day after they had been caught sneaking a kiss in the locker room after training. She had been punished severely, and the way the plastic bindings cut her wrists, and the way that she was left knowing nothing but pain, pain, pain, almost made her forget her own name, but somehow what they did to him was worse. 

When she saw him across the room, he wouldn’t look into her eyes, he wouldn’t even acknowledge her presence. After the room cleared up he said nothing about the bruises that lased her face, and she said nothing about the slight tremor she noticed in his metal arm. It wasn’t until he said that he was being reassigned to some place called HYDRA, did she realize that this wasn’t just some horrid nightmare, it was real.

She knew that this would probably be the last time she would ever see him, and the words “I love you,” were waiting to roll out of her mouth like a broken damn, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it, because saying it meant that this was real, and that would just hurt all the more. She was used to pain, and she was trained to take all forms of it, but she was never trained for heartbreak.

Time was running out fast, and she knew that it was only a matter of time before their handlers came in and separated them once and for all, but she couldn’t help herself. She leaned in for a kiss, and he leaned in as well, but just as there lips meant he pushed her back firmly. It was almost as if he could taste the words on her lips like Chap Stick. 

“Love is for children Natalie,” he whispered, and that was the last thing that he ever said to her, but the only thing that really stuck. 

From that day on she decided to be the stone cold killer that the Red Room wanted her to be, that she should have been all along. And as the days passed she soon forgot the color of his eyes, the gentleness of his touch, and he forgot hers. She tried so hard to hold on to those memories, to savor them like candy on Easter morning, and to cradle them like a baby that will never grow up, but in her experience letting go was better for everyone, and she knew that if she didn’t her memories would just be wiped clean anyways. 

The taste of blood, and the sound of screams soon erased those happy thoughts from her head eventually, or maybe this was what those thoughts were all along. She didn’t really know anymore. 

Now here she was in some alley way being hunted down. She was always the wolf waiting for its prey, but now the tables were turned, and she felt like she had felt so many years ago when she watched the Winter Soldier walk out of the door and never come back; she felt helpless, but more importantly she felt tired.

She was tired working for a place she no longer believed in. She was tired doing her very best only to get nothing in return, and lastly she was tired fighting for a country that didn’t give a damn about her. The pain in her ribs was throbbing like the beating of a drum, the gunshot wound in her shoulder was bleeding profusely, and every inch of her body ached, but for the first time in a long time she was ready to let go. She had worked hard for so many years, she had given up her life for her country, but it was her turn to roll the dice. 

The same people she once trusted had turned against her and sent her on a mission they knew she couldn’t complete. They might as well of signed her own death waver, but Natalie Romanova was tired of being used, so she was finally ready for what awaited her.

She put her back up against the brick wall of the end of the dark alley way, and slid down to her knees. She held her gun with one last bullet tightly in her hands, but she had no intention of using it against someone else. She waited for what seemed like hours though it was merely minutes, and soon enough the archer came into her line of sight. Her vision was blurry, and she knew that it was from the mixture of her concussion and the tears in her eyes, but she wasn’t on the verge of crying because she was scared, she was on the verge of crying because maybe she would finally have some peace. 

His bow and arrow shined in the night sky, the moon reflecting of its surface, and she didn’t care that it was pointed right at her. She didn’t realize that her gun was aimed right at him until he told her to put the gun down. _Old habits die hard._

She put the gun down, and awaited her fate, but he just stared at her, like he was waiting for something.

“You sure are a hard person to find,” he said, but she was becoming inpatient. 

“Just shoot me already,” she said.

“You want to die?” he asked surprised.

“My job here is done, and I have nothing left to live for.”

“What about the people you work for?”

“You want answers, but I’m not going to give them to you. I’m just tired, I’ve been tired for a while now, so please don’t make me beg you to do the honors of putting an arrow through my chest.”

“You’ve got quite an impressive record, and I almost didn’t find you. I wouldn’t have if the people who shot you didn’t find you first, but like I said, you got skill, and we could use talent like yours.”

She didn’t say anything. She just stayed quiet hoping he’d make up his mind already.

“I want to offer you a job, working for SHIELD, the good guys.”

“What’s in it for you?”

“Nothing really, just the look on my handlers face when I bring you in,” he said with a smirk.

He then put down his arrow, and instead stuck out his hand. “So you in?” he asked.

She just nodded her head in response, and took his hand.

“The names Clint by the way.”

*** 

She tried not to think about the debt she owed Clint, not because it was too sad or hard, but because she would never be able to repay him. That day in the alleyway she honestly wanted her life to end, and even after she changed herself from Natalie to Natasha Romanoff, from missionary to agents, and from bad to better, she knew some things would never change.

Then Odessa happened.

She was driving the man she was supposed to be protecting to safety when she got run off the road, and went over a cliff. There was lots of fire, and her arm was busted from the fall, but she was able to get her mark out of the car before it blew, but then she saw him.

The glint of the rifle in the sun was enough to give him away, but it wasn’t until he shot a bullet through her gut into her target did she realize that the bullet wound slowly bleeding out wasn’t what left her feeling numb. 

She tried to place pressure on the other man’s wound but it had hit his heart, and he was already gun, and she was fading fast as well. Her gut was throbbing which each breath she took, and she could hear sirens in the background. Coulson was in her ear asking her to copy, but she couldn’t speak. Her mouth tasted of iron and blood, and her breathing was starting to become ragged, and she knew that she was dying. She was dying the man she had once loved was already dead. She prayed that he had died a long time ago to be free from all this pain, from the pain she was feeling right now, but life isn’t fair like that.

A part of her felt like she deserved it because she didn’t look for him, she didn’t try to stop him from leaving, but that part of her past was buried under so much crap she didn’t think it mattered anymore. Her head had been messed with so many times afterwards that maybe everything she had with him was a dream, and as she was being loaded onto a stretcher, being hooked up to machines, did she realize that this really was a nightmare.

It until her vision faded to black, and the voices turned to whispers that she remembered her ledger; her ledger that was gushing with so much red, and how if hers was red then the Winter Soldiers was broken, and she wasn’t sure which one was worse. 

Natasha spent months after trying to track him down with nothing but a nasty scar to prove that he ever existed. When Clint asked what she was doing, she told him that she wanted to end him, but that was a lie. She wanted to save him, she wanted to give him the chance that she got, but he was a ghost, and she was nothing but a lost kid looking for someone who never existed at all.

*** 

Then New York happened, the day everything went to hell, and the same day she outsmarted the god of tricksters, the same day Coulson died, and the same day she almost lost her partner, but also the same day she meant a new one: Steve Rogers.

Natasha read his file, even before he joined SHIELD. She saw his picture as a skinny kid, and she saw him after the serum. She heard about his last mission to destroy HYDRA, but somehow that name was familiar to her, but like an itch you can’t reach, she let it go because there was a lot of things she couldn’t remember. 

When Steve Rogers was assigned her partner she almost laughed at the thought. It wasn’t that she didn’t respect the man, it was that how was he going to respect her? After everything she’s done, she would be no better than those people he fought in war. Each mission she waited for a question about her past, she waited for a statement about the horrors that filled her dreams at night, but they never came. 

Instead she decided that getting him back into the 21st century would be her first goal. Natasha tried setting him up on dates, she gave him new foods to try, she even watched movies with him, new and old because she was a sucker for a nice film, but she didn’t do all those things because Fury asked her too. She did them because he deserved more then what she got. She had her chance at love, but that was gone, but all his chances got frozen him ice along with him. She made jokes about his age, but deep down she just wanted him to have a future, to have a life full of love and laughter in a world that so often took that for granted. 

They were both lonely souls, but she deserved to be that way, and he deserved everything but. 

*** 

Natasha Romanoff was a spy, she was a liar, but Steve Rogers was the only one who made her want to be honest. She knew that no matter how hard she tried, all she ever would be was a pretty girl with an ugly past, but he made her want to be more, he made her wish she was more. 

That’s why when she found out Fury was dead, she knew that the Winter Soldier did it. He was the only person that could kill a man like Fury, a man that didn’t live in the shadows, but created them. She asked Steve what Fury was doing at his apartment, and when he said that he didn’t know, she knew he was lying. 

But now Fury was dead, the only man she ever truly trusted was gone, and she wasn’t just going to disappear. So she took the thumb drive from the vending machine and waited for Steve to come back for it. She knew that he wouldn’t trust her, but she also knew that he needed someone to trust, that he needed help, so she put aside her privacy and told him about the Winter Soldier, she told him about Odessa and showed him her scar. 

Then they changed clothes and went to the mall to find out more information. SHIELD was looking for them and she had no idea why, but then when she found out HYDRA was SHIELD, and when they got blown up did she remember the way she felt back in the alleyway in Ukraine.

Steve saved her life, just like Clint had. He could have just left her to be found, but he didn’t, and now they were both sitting in some stranger’s bedroom hoping that they didn’t get caught. She told him more about herself then she ever had before, even though he didn’t ask, he never did, but this time he deserved to know.

They all had a plan, Sam, Steve and her, but the Winter Soldier always knew how to interrupt things. After being thrown for the car she made a ran for it. He may not have remembered her, but she remembered him, so when she saw his shadow down from the bridge, she knew not to keep running. 

She was able to shoot him in the eye, and she almost strangled him with her legs, but he was stronger than her, and though he trained her, he was better. She was thrown from his back, and just as he picked up the gun to shoot her, she threw one of her widow bites at his metal arm.

Then she ran, and ran trying to get as much people out of the way, into safety, but he shot her in the shoulder before she even had the chance. He would have killed her too if it wasn’t for Steve.

Everything that happened next was a blur. The man that tried to kill her, the same man that she once loved was Steve Rogers’s best friend Buck Barnes, who was supposed to be dead for ages now. And to top that Fury was really alive and if she wasn’t so pissed off, Natasha might have been thankful. Now they were going to take down SHIELD, and she was going to expose all her secrets out to the world in the process. _What a great way to end the day._

Natasha may not have been ready for the world to see her as she really was, but she was ready to help take down Hydra, and of that meant throwing all her covers out into the open, then that was a risk she was willing to make. She knew when it came down to it Steve was the hero, risking his life, and countless others to take down the big bad, and it was better that way. From far away Natasha Romanoff looked beautiful, like a gorgeous building, but the closer you got to her, the more you realized that though her exterior was nice, the interior was all damaged and broken. Was she really broken? No, not really. She knew what she was doing, she knew what her sins were, but she also knew that that they were wrong, and though she wasn’t forced to do any of them, in a way she didn’t really have a choice, but now she did have a choice, and that choice was to do the good that was once taken away from her.

She was a fire extinguisher, but Steve was the whole fire department. And though she was something of a hero, it was easier for people to believe that all she was, was a wild fire because once people have one view towards something, working to change it was not worth it, not to Natasha. Wild fires spread the flames, and that’s a lot easier to believe then a little extinguisher taking them all down.

Natasha electrocuted herself with her own weapon, so that Pierce could be taken down; Steve stopped fighting so that his friend could be saved. In a way those are the same things, but only one act would be remembered, and it wasn’t hers, but she was okay with that, she had to be.

*** 

It felt like yesterday that SHIELD went down, but Natalie Romanova, Natasha Romanoff, or whoever she really was, was still standing and that was something to be proud of. 

She had given Steve the file she had on the Winter Soldier before she left. She told him that she pulled in some favors to get it from an asset in Kiev, but that wasn’t true. That was her file on him, one of the last things that she had of him, and one of the last things of her past that she voluntarily held onto. It reminded Natasha of what used to be, but never of what could have been, and Steve needed it more then she did right now. It was time to let go.

When she kissed him on the cheek before leaving, it wasn’t a kiss goodbye, but a promise to be the friend that he wanted her to be, a promise to remain good, but she couldn’t leave without setting him up on one last date, one last excuse to be wanted in his life.

After that lots of her past enemies had come after her, at least the ones stupid to think she had gone soft, but she was only getting stronger. She had her bad days like any other person. The days when it seemed like she would never truly clear her ledger, the days when the voices of her past got too loud, or even the days when she forgot what her purpose was. But she was still the Black Widow, and with one bad day came two more good ones, good ones in the sense that she got to kill some bastard from her past, and maybe that was her purpose. Not ridding herself of the badness that she had done, but the world of its bad.

Then Steve Rogers, and Sam Wilson asked for her help finding Bucky, or James, or the Winter Soldier, and like herself, she wasn’t quite sure which one she was looking for, but somewhere deep down she was almost hoping that he wouldn’t remember her because Steve didn’t need that. 

It is better to have lost love then to not have loved at all, and for now that was enough.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading, and just to remind you that in my head this fic was going a entirely different way. All the scenes before the present stuff were supposed to be flash backs, but stuff happened and then this mess happened.
> 
> Thanks again, and any feedback would be highly appreciated:)


End file.
